Hole in One

C. Stephen Gray is the director of information services at the Institute
of Chartered Accountants of Ontario.

The publicist for Walter Stewart’s second mystery novel could
legitimately have described the work as a “highly entertaining
romp.” It is a perfect pastime for a rainy afternoon at the cottage.
But the book may also represent a new literary subgenre, one that owes
its existence more to commercial television than to mystery fiction.
Hole in One manages to be both shamelessly derivative of other popular
mystery series and good fun.

The novel is set in the unlikely Ontario town of Bosky Dell. Its
self-deprecating journalist hero, Carlton Withers, works for a
small-town weekly, the Silver Falls Lancer—“the Voice of the
Kawarthas”—for $268.30 a week. But Withers’s job is in constant
jeopardy, since he is constantly being fired and rehired by his
mercurial managing editor, Tommy Macklin. The only constants in his
reporter’s life are his unreliable Peugeot, Marchepas, and his
precarious relationship (based on partly requited lust) for the
paper’s photographer, Olga Kratzmyer.

The novel’s plot centres on the solving of a mystery: Who killed old
Charlie Tinkelpaugh by putting a bomb under the flagstick on the third
hole at Bosky Dell’s local nine-hole golf course? The novel’s
action, like its setting, is as tranquil and serene as a sunny August
afternoon, and at no time does the reader ever fear for the well-being
of any of the characters. The implausible plot merely serves as an
excuse for Stewart to report the hapless Carlton’s meanderings and
maunderings. The tale is always amusing, its happy outcome never in
doubt.

The novel’s derivative nature helps soothe the reader into a pleasing
sense of amused familiarity. The cottage-country setting is right out of
Ted Wood’s “Murphy’s Harbour” series. Withers’s insouciant
narrative tone is reminiscent of Fletch, the popular character in the
series by Gregory Mcdonald, and his efforts to solve the mystery with
the lust-inspiring (and demonstrably more intelligent) Kratzmyer recall
the adventures of Agatha Christie’s Tommy and Tuppence Beresford.
Kratzmyer’s hard-boiled character sometimes echoes Kinsey Milhone, the
protagonist of Sue Grafton’s highly successful “alphabet”
mysteries. As we follow Withers’s hapless investigatory journey, his
witty reportage serves as a constant reminder that we are in a world
inhabited not by Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, but by P.G. Wodehouse’s
Bertie Wooster.